Video-feedback Intervention to promote Positive Parenting and Sensitive Discipline (VIPP-SD) is a program for 1-3 year old children who were identified as being at risk for developing externalizing behavior problems. The program is intended to impact parental sensitivity and parental sensitive discipline practices in hopes of making the parents more responsive to the needs of the child and more consistent in their parenting. The program had a significant impact on maternal attitudes towards sensitivity and sensitive discipline, and decreasing overactive behaviors in children where a high level of marital discord and daily hassles were recorded.

DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM

Target population: 1-3-year old children at risk for externalizing behavior problems

VIPP-SD intends to reduce externalizing problems in 1-3-year-old children by enhancing maternal sensitivity and adequate discipline strategies. It does this by implementing an early intervention strategy which videotapes the interactions between the mother and child and then gives feedback to the parents as to how to pay more attention to the child’s signals and expressions. In addition to helping parents recognize signals, it helps them learn how to respond appropriately to these cues with a focus on parental sensitivity and sensitive discipline. The intervention takes place in the families’ homes. The sessions occur six times, the first four happen once a month and the last two happen every other month. Each session lasts 1.5 hours. There are three steps to the intervention over the course of the 6 sessions. First, the staff gets acquainted with the mother and builds trust so they can focus on the video feedback for child behavior. Second, the interveners work on improving parent behaviors by presenting proven parenting strategies. Third, the staff use booster sessions to review feedback and information from previous sections.

EVALUATION OF PROGRAM

Evaluated Population: The study intended to evaluate and intervene on families with children who showed high externalizing behavior problems. They involved 237 families of 3-5 year olds.

Approach: Three to five year old children in the Netherlands were randomly recruited from community records and then screened for externalizing behavior problems. The children must be in the 75th percentile on the CBCL/1.5-5 Externalizing Problems scale to be selected for the intervention study. Of the 438 families that met these criteria, 237 (54%) participated in the intervention. The intervention took place in the homes of the participants. The mothers in the control group received 6 phone interviews that asked them to talk about the general development of their child without the interviewers giving advice on child development. The study measured family and personality components such as daily hassles, marital discord, well-being, difficult temperament, externalizing problems and maternal attitudes toward sensitivity and sensitive discipline. The data was collected first at the screening, then at the pre-test in the laboratory and during the sessions.

Results: The results indicated that the intervention had a significant impact on attitudes towards sensitivity and sensitive discipline. The tests also showed that intervention group mothers displayed more positive discipline over time than control group mothers. When other variables were introduced, such as level of marital discord and daily hassles, the intervention had a significant impact on decreasing overactive child behavior in these conditions. However, when looking at just the change in maternal attitudes towards sensitivity and sensitive discipline, the attitudes alone did not significantly change the child’s overactive behaviors.